Gestures refer to the communication where visible bodily actions are used to communicate important messages. They include movement of hands, face, or other parts of the body. Gestures benefit our lives a lot. Take language learning.
In some languages, certain syllables (音节) within words are pronounced with markedly more weight than others, called lexical stress. Languages such as English commonly feature lexical stress. For example, the word “accent” involves more emphasis on the first syllable, “ac”, than the second, “cent”. Native speakers of Chinese, however, don’t use lexical stress and therefore find it difficult to learn languages that feature it.
Making any hand gesture could help learners recognize lexical stress, which has been proved by Xing Tian’s team. They selected 124 native Chinese speakers, who watched videos of people performing hand movements that were synced(同步的) to recordings of the same English words. In addition, they also found when more pronounced gestures matched the stressed syllable, the participants were particularly good at identifying it.
The research involved several experiments, which makes it difficult to combine the results. Nevertheless, Tian estimates that the use of gestures helped identify lexical stress between 10 and 15 percent more accurately compared with no gestures at all, and how much help depends on the nature of gestures.
A follow-up study conducted by another team exposed the same Chinese speakers to Russian words and got similar results. “Our findings highlight the functional role of gestures in enhancing speech learning, suggesting practical strategies for language teaching and learning,” the researchers write in their paper.
The benefits of gestures extend far beyond teaching and learning. Since gestures are deeply integrated into our daily lives, they deserve more of our attention.
1. What do gestures mean?2. What did Xing Tian’s team find in their study?
3. Please decide which part is false in the following statement, then underline it and explain why.
Gestures help learn lexical stress, but the degree to which they help depends on the complexity of the lexical stress.
4. Besides what is mentioned in the passage, how do gestures benefit you in your life? (In about 40words)
Learner’s dictionaries, all in English, are specially designed to help students.
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4 . Learning a second language is tricky at any age and it only gets tougher the longer you wait to open that dusty French book. Now, in a new study, scientists have pinpointed the exact age at which your chances of reaching fluency in a second language seem to plummet: 10.
The study, published in the journal Cognition, found that it’s “nearly impossible” for language learners to reach native-level fluency if they start learning a second tongue after 10. But that doesn’t seem to be because language skills go downhill. “It turns out you’re still learning fast. It’s just that you run out of time, because your ability to learn starts dropping at around 17 or 18 years old,” says study co-author Joshua Hartshorne, an assistant professor of psychology at Boston College.
Kids may be better than adults at learning new languages for many reasons. Children’s brains are more plastic than those of adults, meaning they’re better able to adapt and respond to new information. “All learning involves the brain changing,” Hartshorne says, “and children’s brains seem to be a lot more skilled at changing.”
Kids may also be more willing to try new things (and to potentially look foolish in the process) than adults are. Their comparatively new grasp on their native tongue may also be advantageous. Unlike adults, who tend to default (默认) to the rules and patterns of their first language, kids may be able to approach a new one with a blank slate (石板).
These findings may seem discouraging, but it was heartening for scientists to learn that the critical period for fluent language acquisition might be longer than they previously thought. Some scientists believed that the brief window closes shortly after birth, while others stretched it only to early adolescence. Compared to those estimates, 17 or 18 — when language learning ability starts to drop off — seems relatively old.
“People fared better when they learned by immersion (沉浸), rather than simply in a classroom. And moving to a place where your desired language is spoken is the best way to learn as an adult. If that’s not an option, you can mimic an immersive environment by finding ways to have conversations with native speakers in their own communities,” Hartshorne says. By doing so, it’s possible to become conversationally proficient — even without the advantage of a child’s brain.
1. The underlined word “plummet” in Paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to “__________”.| A．decrease | B．rise |
| C．end | D．vary |
| A．Children are too young to grasp a second language. |
| B．Age 10-18 is the best time to learn a second language. |
| C．Adults go beyond the critical period for learning a second language. |
| D．Communicating with native speakers enables you to master all the language skills. |
| A．Adults are less influenced by their mother tongues. |
| B．Adults spend more time responding to new information. |
| C．Adults are only too willing to experience something awkward in the process. |
| D．Adults prefer an immersive environment to a classroom in learning a second language. |
| A．the best age to learn a second language |
| B．the approaches to learning a second language |
| C．why kids learn a second language more easily than adults |
| D．whether adults can learn a second language like their younger selves |
5 . No student of a foreign language needs to be told that grammar is complex. By changing the order of the words and by adding a range of auxiliary verbs (助动词) and suffixes (后缀), we can turn a statement into a question, state whether an action has taken place or is soon to take place, and perform many other word tricks to convey different meanings. However, the question which many language experts can’t understand and explain is — who created grammar?
Some recent languages evolved due to the Atlantic slave trade. Since the slaves didn’t know each other’s languages, they developed a make-shift language called a pidgin. Pidgins are strings of words copied from the language of the landowners. They have little in the way of grammar, and speakers need to use too many words to make their meaning understood. Interestingly, however, all it takes for a pidgin to become a complex language is for a group of children to be exposed to it at the time when they learn their mother tongue. Slave children didn’t simply copy the strings of words used by their elders. They adapted their words to create an expressive language. In this way complex grammar systems which come from pidgins were invented.
Further evidence can be seen in studying sign languages for the deaf. Sign languages are not simply a group of gestures; they use the same grammatical machinery that is found in spoken languages. The creation of one such language was documented quite recently in Nicaragua. Previously, although deaf children were taught speech and lip reading in the classrooms, in the playgrounds they began to invent their own sign system, using the gestures they used at home. It was basically a pidgin and there was no consistent grammar. However, a new system was born when children who joined the school later developed a quite different sign language. It was based on the signs of the older children, but it was shorter and easier to understand, and it had a large range of special use of grammar to clarify the meaning. What’s more, they all used the signs in the same way. So the original pidgin was greatly improved.
Most experts believe that many of the languages were pidgins at first. They were initially used in different groups of people without standardization and gradually evolved into a widely accepted system. The English past tense—“ed” ending — may have evolved from the verb “do”. “It ended” may once have been “It end-did”. It seems that children have grammatical machinery in their brains. Their minds can serve to create logical and complex structures, even when there is no grammar present for them to copy.
1. What can be inferred about the slaves’ pidgin language?| A．It was difficult to understand. |
| B．It came from different languages. |
| C．It was created by the landowners. |
| D．It contained highly complex grammar. |
| A．No consistent signs were used for communication. |
| B．Most of the gestures were made for everyday activities. |
| C．The hand movements were smoother and more attractive. |
| D．The meaning was clearer than the previous sign language. |
| A．English grammar of past tense system is inaccurate. |
| B．Children say English past tense differently from adults. |
| C．The thought that English was once a pidgin is acceptable. |
| D．Experts have proven that English was created by children. |
| A．The Creators of Grammar | B．The History of Languages |
| C．Why Pidgins Came into Being | D．How Grammar Systems Are Used |
